Boot Problems

My sisters IBM thinkpad laptop messed up for some reason and its been causing some hassle and stress.

when the laptop powers up, the bios 'loads' up but when it comes to loading the os the screen goes blank but the backlight remains on. After restarting and holding f8 i was told what i suspected - no os found. i though simple - MBR has been damaged just need to load up TestDisk from the 'ultimate boot cd' and fix it.

However when trying to load the Utilities from the disk it appears to start to load up but then the screen goes blank but the backlight remains on like before. I inserted a windows cd and the same problem occured (after i pressed any key to boot from the disk). However i inserted a Ubuntu live cd and it loaded up sucessfully.

Any help available?

Well, the fact that ubuntu loads up fine is a good sign...can you mount your local hard disk (probably /dev/hda) and have a poke around? can it see a file system? what output does "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l" give?

M0KUJ1N said:

Well, the fact that ubuntu loads up fine is a good sign...can you mount your local hard disk (probably /dev/hda) and have a poke around? can it see a file system? what output does "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l" give?

Click to expand...

I tried mounting /dev/hda1 on /media/windows but no files showed up. However using TestDisk i can browse though the drive.

Will this by any chance help: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17614687

M0KUJ1N said:

Well, the fact that ubuntu loads up fine is a good sign...can you mount your local hard disk (probably /dev/hda) and have a poke around? can it see a file system? what output does "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l" give?

Click to expand...

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 4864 39070048+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mkdir /media/windows
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/hda /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222
mount: /dev/hda already mounted or /media/windows/ busy
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ cd /media/windows
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/windows$ ls
ls: reading directory .: Input/output error
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/windows$

Looks fairly fubar I'm afraid

The only thing I can suggest is using fdisk to recreate the partition and write the info to disk (normally this is a very risky procedure as you need to get the partition sizes correct to the cylinder. However as you only have one big partition on that machine it should be OK )

Ill admit my preferred live CD for data recovery is Knoppix and not Ubuntu, purely because it doesnt attempt to automount drives but gives you the option to mount them post-boot, and it has some nice features for retrieving data such as Wizard-based Samba server setup. However GNU tools are the same no matter which *nix you are using so it shouldnt really make any difference.

Good luck but if this fails it looks like a complete reinstall will be needed.

The only other suggestion I have if this fails is to take the disk out, mount it in a caddy and use GetDataBack to retrieve as much of her data as possible before blatting it.